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The future of 32-bit Linux

The future of 32-bit Linux

Posted Jan 1, 2021 11:25 UTC (Fri) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
Parent article: The future of 32-bit Linux

Nice write-up Arnd. A few points:

- I haven't seen Alpha mentioned anywhere, probably because it directly entered as 64-bit, as the 32-bit variants were already outdated when Linux was ported there

- there were 32-bit x86 systems after the atom 270. I've been trapped into this by buying a cheap ASUS EeePC netbook equipped with a Atom N2600 (which I'm currently typing on). While the CPU was designed to be 64-bit (and I bought it for this reason), this one is limited to 32-bit, and long mode cannot be enabled in the BIOS. I suspect that ASUS had a deal with intel to buy the defective 64-bit chips that were still working fine for 32-bit. I don't think this practice exists anymore though.

- the RK3288 (quad-cortex A17) was present a lot in the wild but mostly in proprietary Android-based set-top-boxes and HDMI sticks. These were not documented and were a real pain to convert to Linux, hence why there are almost no DTS files for them, and it's sad because these chips are very powerful and available at plenty of places in large configurations which could have made nice little PCs by then (typically 1-2GB RAM)


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The future of 32-bit Linux

Posted Mar 15, 2021 22:44 UTC (Mon) by mat2 (guest, #100235) [Link] (2 responses)

"While the CPU was designed to be 64-bit (and I bought it for this reason), this one is limited to 32-bit, and long mode cannot be enabled in the BIOS."

Well, I wonder whether the 64-bit mode is really disabled in the CPU or only hidden in the CPUID flags. If the latter, the computer could be made to run a 64-bit kernel.

Similarly, there are some Pentium M processors that support PAE (Physical Address Extensions), but do not show this support in CPUID. They could be made to run distributions that require PAE with the "forcepae" kernel command line parameter.

This could be tested by removing the verify_cpu check in arch/x86/boot/compressed/head_64.S

The future of 32-bit Linux

Posted Mar 16, 2021 13:11 UTC (Tue) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

A quicker check, maybe, for this situation on an unknown PC: boot the netinst for Debian multi-arch - there are various settings there, one of which is 64 bit kernel and 32 bit userland.

I do remember a Toshiba tablet/convertible PC which was almost exactly this and the multi-arch was the only thing that would boot
it at all.

The future of 32-bit Linux

Posted Mar 16, 2021 18:08 UTC (Tue) by mat2 (guest, #100235) [Link]

This won't work because the 64-bit kernel detects whether the CPU supports the 64-bit mode and refuses to boot otherwise.
So a mixed mode system will not boot, it is necessary to override the check in the kernel.


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